Sunnyvale, Calif. -- February 28, 2007 --AMD (NYSE: AMD) today introduced the AMD 690 series chipset, the company's first chipset to bring together the combined strengths of AMD CPU and platform technology with the industry-leading features of the ATI Radeon™ X1250 GPU.

The ECS AMD690GM-M2 motherboard features the AMD 690G Chipset with an AMD RS690G Northbridge, an AMD SB600 Southbridge and an ATI A-Link. It's onboard ATI Radeon X1250 graphics chip offers a nice feature, it can use up to 512MB of system memory for its frame buffer. With only 1 PCIe 16x slot, the board is aimed at the price concious consumer, and you can find out a lot more about it on TweakTown.

nVIDIA seems to be taking the world of chipsets by storm, with only Intel's newer chipsets for Core 2 competing. There is another player trying to make it's name though, and is mostly due to scarcity that it hasn't. The RD600 chipset supports Crossfire, and as X-bit Labs discovers, it likes overclocking just fine. Head on over for the full review of the DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G.

[H]ard|OCP reviews a new 975X board from ASUS. The P5B-E is much like the Deluxe version that is out already, especially when it comes to overclocking. With 450MHz FSB within reach, this motherboard offers a lot for a small price. Even without a second PCI-E 16x slot, there are a lot of extras on this board, so give it a look. There were some oddities during the testing stage, keep an eye on this thread in their forums

HEXUS has managed to get a glimpse of the newest member of ASUS' Republic of Gamers motherboard. The Commando is based around a P965 chipset, and includes some very nice features, like a reset CMOS button (not a jumper). Tied in with these features is support for blazing fast bus speeds, in the neighbourhood of 2.28GHz! Head over and take a long look at these pictures.

Finally the motherboards undergo an 'in-circuit test' which involves testing each motherboard's circuit paths, electrical characteristics and the chips that have just been added by applying electrical current to certain specific test points on the board.

Apparent overclocking potential is one of very few differences between MSI's P965 and 975X Platinum. Price is another, and given just how similar the boards are, I'm not sure the 975X is worth the extra $20â€”not unless you really want Viiv support. That's not a knock against the 975X Platinum, mind you; it's the cheapest enthusiast-oriented 975X board on the market.

However, there are a few areas of improvement that became more apparent during the overclocking test runs. My biggest complaints center on the board cooling mechanisms, or lack thereof. The northbridge passive chipset cooler was barely adequate for stock running, but quickly became too hot to handle when any overclocking was attempted. This was easily remedied with a low speed fan.

Some BFG customers using the BFG nForceÂ® 680i SLI motherboard have reported experiencing disconnect or write error issues with SATA disk drives. To address this, we have worked with NVIDIA to release a BIOS update for this motherboard that eliminates this bug.

Picking our Editor's Choice from this lot is tough, but we can prune a few options right away. The KN3 SLI2 is out of the running for obvious reasons, and while the M2N32 WS Pro is a great single-socket workstation board, it's too expensive for enthusiasts who don't need PCI-X.